The power to influence

Does your visual identity help or hinder your growth?

school marketing news

Keeping track of your competitors’ social media activities is imperative for your school brand survival and for the proper curation of your own social media content. If social media is a strong component of your overall school marketing strategy, competitor analysis is a must-have tool in your marketing toolkit.

We’ve written plenty on Social Media use within schools but seldom detailed the policy surrounding its usage and implementation. This information may be covered in a standalone Social Media Policy or as a section within an overarching School Communications Policy. Either way, it’s crucial to plainly spell out the dos and don’ts of social media use, by staff and students alike, at your school so you can avoid incidents like this.

Traditional marketing strategies prioritise the ‘quantity over quality’ philosophy when it comes to generating leads. Under this approach, marketers attempt to collect more leads in order to deliver content to a wider number of prospects, hoping that more prospects will engage with them. This ‘casting a wider net’ strategy can overwhelm marketing efforts since it requires focusing on a larger group of people.

This approach may also dilute marketing initiatives since it requires marketers to design content to suit the common preferences of their leads. This will lead to less efficient school marketing and reduced conversions from leads to actual enrolments. Worse, this approach can backfire; prospects can become annoyed if they receive content that they’re not interested in.

Your school’s social media marketing is not just about creating content and posting it online – it’s also about evaluating your content to see what works and orient them towards your target objectives. Social media marketing should not be based on intuition, but on a continuous process of refinement. You should check if your social media strategy is generating engagement, whether it be in the form of comments, inquiries or site visits. In order to improve your social media content and gain these results, you must be able to measure the degree of success of your previous and current social media content.

Insights into the world of school marketing and communications, presented by Brad Entwistle and Andrew Sculthorpe. Brad and Scully discuss the idea that you shouldn’t use enrolments as a key performance indicator; the fact that Google and Facebook now control 20 percent of global media ad spend; how to show culture through your brand; interview Rita Kilroy, imageseven Senior Account Manager, on lead generation and inbound; removing inappropriate advertising from your brand the right way; and how to persuade your boss to fork out for your marketing training.

Insights into the world of school marketing and communications, presented by Brad Entwistle and Andrew Sculthorpe. Brad interviews Brian Massey, head of conversion optimisation agency, Conversion Sciences. Brad and Brian discuss the role of conversion optimisation for low traffic sites; the process for self-diagnosing conversion issues; how to identify issues on your website and how to rank them; and examples of generalising words to classify your site issues and determine major conversion problem areas.

We all need some help from time to time. It gets difficult to find time to do research or get some casual blog reading in. Branding in particular, is something that doesn’t cross our minds all that often. We get so caught up in the day-to-day running of our schools that the big picture doesn’t often come up. Analytics are another topic that isn’t discussed as often as it should be, so this blog will focus on branding and analytics respectively. I see a lot of different blogs and come across many useful web apps that can be informative and time saving, so here are a few good ones that I’ve spent the time finding, so you don’t have to.

Here are three resources to help develop your school's branding and three resources to better analyse your online content.